News Story

Saints Row IV as a next-gen launch title could "jeopardise everything"

The guys and gals over at Volition Inc. heard rumblings that now might be the time those next-gen fancy pants console would be arriving on the scene, but they preferred to stick with Xbox 360 and PS3.

They remember their PS2 launch title days with Summoner and it was "one of the most stressful things we worked on." All that pressure of time and fighting tech quirks just wasn't worth repeating.

Besides, working with platforms they know inside out meant they could accomplish a lot more of their outlandish craziness in Saints Row IV. They love it too much to gamble.

"We’ve been working on Saints Row IV for a couple of years now, and we’ve been working on it with this timeframe in mind," Jim Boone tells us in our chin-wagging interview.

"I mean we heard the rumours back then that this is when the next gen consoles might also be appearing, but if we look back at our past, when we did Summoner as a PlayStation 2 launch title, it was one of the most stressful things we worked on. It was incredibly difficult to do. We always thought we could have done better on that game if it weren’t a launch title, so the thought is we wanted to do something here where we gave ourselves the right amount of time and focus."

"If we had done it for next-gen, I think the fear is we wouldn’t have done it right, and with a franchise that we love as much as Saints Row, we didn’t want to jeopardise everything we’d worked on," he added.

The great news for the PlayStation community is that the PS4 is ludicrously close in development behaviour and architecture to that of the desktop PC, meaning no more Rubik cube trial and error with PS3-style Cell. As Saints Row IV also represents the 'end of this saga' for the series, it offers Volition a clean break on PlayStation 4 later.

Saints Row IV releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC August 20th in the US, 23rd in Europe.